Clementine

Sara Pennypacker’s Clementine is a short chapter book for elementary-aged readers. Marla Frazee’s black and white illustrations bring the text to life. Clementine and the subsequent books in the series have won numerous awards; notably, Clementine is a New York Times bestseller and the winner of the 2007 Boston Globe/Horn Book Award. Little, Brown and Company published Clementine in 2006. This study guide refers to the 2008 first trade paperback edition of the book.

Plot Summary

Clementine is a creative and excitable third-grade student and the protagonist of the novel. Written from Clementine’s perspective, the book follows her as she navigates conflicts with friends and family. Clementine lives in an apartment with her mother, father, and young brother. Clementine’s friend Margaret lives in the same apartment building.

Over the course of the short novel, Clementine’s quirks and creativity emerge as she gets herself into problematic situations. The book opens with Clementine going to the principal’s office after an incident involving Margaret’s hair. In art class, Clementine noticed Margaret leaving for the bathroom with “scrunched-up don’t-cry eyes” (5); when she followed Margaret, Clementine found her friend in tears over glue stuck in her hair. Clementine quickly problem-solved by helping Margaret cut off her hair—first a little, then all of it, with Margaret’s permission.

The haircutting incident leads to a host of consequences: Margaret’s mother is mad, Margaret is embarrassed, and Clementine is in trouble with the principal. As Clementine tries to solve the problem she only makes it worse: First she colors hair in on Margaret’s head, then cuts off her own hair, then she has Margaret color her head. Throughout Clementine’s trials, she draws illustrations of what she sees and muses on her relationship with her little brother—a toddler whom she only calls vegetable names like “Broccoli—” and her fraught friendship with Margaret.

Pennypacker presents Clementine’s creativity and energetic nature throughout the novel. For example, Clementine helps her dad stop pigeons from nesting on the building with a creative solution: She figures out how to convince Mrs. Jacobi to throw pigeon snacks from the side, not the front, of her apartment. When Clementine is presented with any hints that Margaret or her family might find her behavior frustrating, she works hard to feel loved again. She makes Margaret a special gift with household objects. At the end of the novel, she is very surprised when her parents throw her a party because of her solution to the pigeon problem.

While most of the book revolves around the Margaret’s hair, Clementine is also a novel about one eight-year-old’s solutions to being a young person who acts in ways that she knows the adults in her life find frustrating. Clementine uses her observation skills to think about the world around her, eventually learning that being different is what can make people “perfect” (133).